Romanticism &
Contemporary Culture

Critical Presentism

Phillip Barrish, University of Texas at Austin

Notes

¹ For recent treatments see Schafer, Adams and van Minnen, and Lipset.
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² Miller, Errand into the Wilderness; Miller, Nature's Nation; Bercovitch, Puritan Origins of the American Self; Bercovitch, American Jeremiad.
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³ See Dinshaw, especially Introduction, and Chapters One and Two.
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⁴ The key decision in the Hopwood case was actually issued by a panel of three judges assigned to consider the Hopwood plaintiffs' appeal of an earlier District Court ruling in the case. The judge in the District Court case, Sam Sparks, had found unconstitutional the specific affirmative action mechanisms in place when Karen Hopwood et al had applied to UT's Law School, but he had awarded no damages to the plaintiffs. Moreover, following the Supreme Court's 1978 opinion in Bakke vs. University of California, Judge Sparks's ruling would still have allowed for a system that treated race as one (but never the sole deciding) factor in admissions. The Fifth Circuit's three-judge panel went much further, declaring that race could not play any sort of role in admissions decisions by the Law School. (In doing so, the panel controversially--and some argued illegally—set Bakke aside.) Although there was room for ambiguity about whether the panel's decree against giving race any consideration whatsoever applied to anything besides UT Law School admissions, Texas's attorney general at the time, Dan Morales, issued a binding interpretation that read the ruling as broadly as possible. All of Texas's public universities, Morales said, would have to cease any consideration of race not only in admissions but in financial aid and hiring. Four months after the three-judge panel's decision, the Supreme Court declined to become involved in the case. As of this writing (February 2001), The University's most recent appeal, partly concerning the damages and costs awarded to the Hopwood plaintiffs but also asking for an en banc hearing on the case's constitutional issues by the Fifth Circuit's full panel of 15 judges, has been denied.
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⁵ In addition to the symposia of theater people transcribed in Elsom's text, see the influential work by Kott to which they were responding. A prominent recent example of pointed anachronism in the staging of Shakespeare is Richard Loncraine's 1995 film of Richard III, which resets the play into a fascist-dominated England of the 1930s and also resonates with the Thatcher era. For an illuminatingly close analysis of this movie, see Loehlin.
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⁶ See Grillo and Wildman. For a critique of how nineteenth- and early-twentieth century white women used race-based slavery as, in effect, a political metaphor for their own oppression, see Sánchez-Eppler.
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